In exemplary embodiments of the present invention systems and methods are provided to implement and facilitate cross-fading, interstitials and other effects/processing of two or more media elements in a personalized media delivery service so that each client or user has a consistent high quality experience. The effects or crossfade processing can occur on the broadcast, publisher or server-side, but can still be personalized to a specific user, thus still allowing a personalized experience for each individual user, in a manner where the processing burden is minimized on the downstream side or client device. This approach enables a consistent user experience, independent of client device capabilities, both static and dynamic. The cross-fade can be implemented after decoding the relevant chunks of each component clip, processing, recoding and rechunking, or, in a preferred embodiment, the cross-fade or other effect can be implemented on the relevant chunks to the effect in the compressed domain, thus obviating any loss of quality by re-encoding. A large scale personalized content delivery service can be implemented by limiting the processing to essentially the first and last chunks of any file, since there is no need to processing the full clip. In exemplary embodiments of the present invention this type of processing can easily be accommodated in cloud computing technology, where the first and last files may be conveniently extracted and processed within the cloud to meet the required load. Processing may also be done locally, for example, by the broadcaster, with sufficient processing power to manage peak load.

Methods and systems for providing crowdsourced creative works including receiving creative works such as music in a digital format, providing the creative works to judges in a random and anonymous manner, receiving scores of the creative works from the judges, calculating a cumulative score using the scores received from the judges and including the creative works in a subset of works available to consumers on an digital platform only if the cumulative score qualifies for inclusion based upon a threshold value. The judges may be evaluated for quality, and only the scores of those judges having sufficient quality may be included in the cumulative scores of the creative works. The quality of the judges may be determined using the popularity of past creative works judged by the judges as compared to the scores provided by the judges.

Due to discrepancies in musical timing signatures, the invention assesses whether a recorded displacement, expressed in terms of beats and fractions, between exit and entry points for a potential musical splice or cut, corresponds to permit a seamless music splicing of different musical sections. Assessment is achieved by establishing a third time base of pulses having a length dependent upon a lowest common multiple of fractions within respective bars for different sections, with the bars of the respective sections then partitioned into an equal number of fixed length pulses. A coefficient aligns different time signatures; it is a ratio between pulses within the different sections. The coefficient identifies corresponding locations of a cut point, related to a suitable anacrusis, in terms of respectively an aligned bar, beat, quaver and fraction in differing time signatures. The coefficient ensures that the time anacrusis in one time signature is interchangeable with others.

A method according to one aspect of the present disclosure includes acquiring verbal data representing a verbal expression corresponding to a sound reproduced by an acoustic device, and displaying, on a display device, motion graphics including the verbal expression corresponding to the sound reproduced by the acoustic device in a form of a text in accordance with the verbal data. The displaying the motion graphics on the display device includes selecting a type of motion graphics that relates to the verbal expression corresponding to the reproduced sound from among various types of motion graphics and displaying the selected type of motion graphics on the display device.

The disclosed generative composition system produces a composition to a briefing that describes a musical journey in emotional descriptions. The composition is assembled from concatenated interchangeable Form Atoms FAs selectable by tags aligning emotional descriptions with respective compositional heuristics. Each FA has self-contained constructional properties representative of an historical musical corpus. These heuristics support generation of chords, in chord schemes of musical tonics, achieving an equivalent form function. Each FA also includes chord spacer heuristics that temporally space generated chords across a defined musical window, and a chord list in a local tonic defining branching structures giving options for generating different chords. A progression descriptor, in combination with a form function, expresses musically a question, an answer or a statement, with each FA creating a meta-map of a chord scheme for a musical section. Musical transitions between FA reflect groupings in which FA have similar tags but different constructional properties.

A media-content augmentation system includes a database with a multiplicity of media files and associated metadata. Each media file is mapped to at least one contextual theme defined by beginning and end timings. A processing system couples to the database; and an input couples to the processing system. The input is in the form of temporally-varying events data. The processing system resolves the input into one or more categorized contextual themes, correlates the themes with metadata associated with selected media files relevant to the themes, and then splices or fades together selected media files to reflect the events as the input varies with time, thus generating as an output, a media product in which transitions between media are aligned with the temporally-varying events. The database may contain sections of digital media files. A method aligns sections in digital media files with temporally-varying events data to compose a media product.

Methods, systems and apparatus to characterize audio using transchromagrams are disclosed. An example apparatus includes a transchromagram generator to generate a data structure based on a set of transition matrices corresponding to a plurality of time frames of audio data, the data structure indicative of probabilities that first musical notes will transition to second musical notes, a database controller to prompt a database to store the data structure within the audio data, and a notification manager to generate, based on a comparison between query audio data and the stored data structure of the audio data, a notification identifying at least one characteristic of the query audio data.

A method for automating audio mashup production is disclosed. First, two or more audio files are received. Based on two or more audio files, two or more stem audio files and reference metadata associated with the two or more audio files are retrieved from a server. Each of the two or more stem audio files includes at least one of an instrument portion or a vocal portion that are included in the two or more audio files. After retrieval of the two or more stem audio files and the reference metadata, at least some musical parameters associated with segments of the two or more stem audio files are adjusted. Thereafter, the two or more stem audio files or adjusted segments of the two or more stem audio files can be combined into a single audio file. The single audio file is output to a user device.

Systems and methods are presented for efficient cross-fading of compressed domain information streams on a user/client device. Exemplary systems may provide cross-fade between AAC/Enhanced AAC Plus information streams, between MP3 information streams, or between information streams of unmatched formats. These systems are distinguished in that cross-fade is directly applied to compressed bitstreams so a single decode operation is performed on the resulting bitstream. Thus, a set of frames from each input stream associated with the time interval in which a cross fade is decoded, and combined and recoded with a cross fade or other effect now in the compressed bitstream. Once sent through the client device's decoder, the user hears the transitional effect. The only input data that is decoded and processed is that associated with the portion of each stream used the crossfade, blend or other interstitial, and thus the vast majority of input streams are left compressed.

The present disclosure describes techniques for identifying languages associated with music. Training data may be received, wherein the training data comprise information indicative of audio data representative of a plurality of music samples and metadata associated with the plurality of music samples. The training data further comprises information indicating a language corresponding to each of the plurality of music samples. A machine learning model may be trained to identify a language associated with a piece of music by applying the training data to the machine model until the model reaches a predetermined recognition accuracy. A language associated with the piece of music may be determined using the trained machine learning model.